Apostrophe and elision

What it is

One small raised mark does three unrelated jobs: it separates a suffix from the word it attaches to, it marks a possessor, and it stands where letters have been dropped. Which of the three a community recognizes, and under what conditions, is settled rather than derivable.

Every part of that is open. The suffix may be separated or written solid; a possessive may take the mark with a following s or without one; an elided sound may be marked, marked only in some kinds of text, or not marked at all.

The apostrophe separating a suffix from an abbreviation or a numeral belongs to the abbreviation record. What is left is the mark on a proper name, a possessive and an omission.

Where the expectation comes from

Codified, on three codes rather than one, each describing a narrower reach than the tier's name suggests. English, the fourth language here, has no orthography authority, and its rules are the English Style Guide's at 2.39 to 2.44.

• Turkish. The Türk Dil Kurumu separates case and possessive suffixes from a proper noun with the mark, as in "Türkiye'mizin". Names of kurum, kuruluş, kurul, birleşim, oturum and iş yeri take their suffixes solid instead, and a proper noun already carrying the third-person possessive takes no mark before a further one, as in "Boğaz Köprümüzün güzelliği".
• Dutch, codified but bounded by subject matter. The Technische Handleiding lists the apostrophe among the hulptekens, for certain abbreviations, plurals and genitives; the Leidraad carries the possessive rules, writing the s solid unless the base ends in a long vowel or a sibilant (14.A), the mark before the s after a long vowel (14.B), and the mark alone after a sibilant (14.C). Neither work has a chapter on punctuation, so the apostrophe is codified in Dutch as a spelling aid while the comma, the dash and the quotation mark are not.
• Spanish, where the code rules the mark largely out. The Ortografía calls it an auxiliary sign hardly used in present-day Spanish, whose function is to show the suppression of sounds and whose use is now confined to philological and literary purposes, and it forbids the mark for apócope and aféresis occurring independently of the following word. The Academies' companion work keeps unmodernized old texts, as in "d'aquel", reproduced speech, and carried-over foreign forms.
• The Leidraad introduction says the authorities in Flanders and the Netherlands prescribe the official spelling to themselves and to education, that other users are not obliged and that breaches are not punished. Codified still holds: the test is whether a deviation is an error to a competent reader.

Consequences for translation

Determinate on every side once the target code is known, with one qualification about what is decided first.

• The mark's presence can turn on a classification made before the orthography applies. The same Turkish code writes "Çanakkale Boğazı'nın" with the mark and "Türk Dil Kurumundan" without it, so the spelling follows from whether the name denotes a place or a body. A determinate conversion resting on an indeterminate prior judgement is still determinate, but that judgement has to be made and can be wrong.
• Elision is not converted; it is kept or dropped as the target code allows. Spanish bars the mark for its own suppressions and keeps it inside a carried foreign form, so an elided form travelling into Spanish keeps its mark and a Spanish colloquial one never acquires one.
• Codified is not statutory, and it is not soft either. The wrong possessive produces a form the target code names as wrong rather than one that merely reads as foreign, while a house sheet that departs from a code owns the finding itself.

Examples

EN>NL

• Source: Jacques Delors's presidency
• Target: Alexandre Dumas' meesterwerk
• Comment: Each authority's own printed example of one case, a French surname ending in -s taking a possessive. The guide at 2.40 adds the s after the mark; the Leidraad at 14.C writes the mark alone. The names differ because these are the authorities' own examples rather than one string carried across.

EN>TR

• Source: Cyprus's recovery and resilience plan
• Target: Çanakkale Boğazı'nın
• Comment: The same operation on a proper name, in each code's own illustration. English joins the suffix to the name; Turkish separates it with the mark. The condition English does not have sits in the same rule set, where "Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisine" takes no mark at all.

NL>EN

• Source: oma's
• Target: 747s
• Comment: The plural of a form that would otherwise be misread. The Leidraad writes the mark before the plural s after a long vowel written with a single letter; the guide writes none in the plural of a figure at 2.43 and one only in the plural of a single letter at 2.44.

References

• Türk Dil Kurumu, Yazım Kuralları, the page Kesme İşareti with its uyarı on the third-person possessive, read at tdk.gov.tr.
• Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, 2.ª edición. Real Academia Española and Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, entry "apóstrofo", read at rae.es.
• Ortografía de la lengua española. Real Academia Española and Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, section 4.5 (Apóstrofo), read at rae.es in the online text, which prints no edition year.
• Leidraad, Woordenlijst Nederlandse Taal, Nederlandse Taalunie. Chapter 13 (Speciale meervouden van zelfstandige naamwoorden), rule 13.B, and chapter 14 (Bezitsvorm van zelfstandige naamwoorden), rules 14.A, 14.B and 14.C, with the introduction on the reach of the official spelling, read at woordenlijst.org.
• Technische Handleiding. Regels voor de officiële spelling van het Nederlands, Commissie Spelling, oktober 2016, of which the Comité van Ministers of the Nederlandse Taalunie took note with approval on 5 December 2016. Section 2.5.1 (hulptekens) and section 11 (De apostrof), the latter cited for its heading and its subdivisions 11.1 to 11.7.
• English Style Guide. Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, eighth edition January 2016, file consulted 21 November 2025. Sections 2.39 (Possessive of nouns), 2.40 (Nouns ending in -s), 2.43 (Plurals of figures) and 2.44 (Plurals of single letters).